The issue of social justice is a dominating theme in our daily lives. In fact, concerns about the value of justice in our social lives go back to ancient moral philosophers such as Plato and Socrates (Rawls 1971). Indeed, the concept of social justice is related to humanitarian and ethical standards that describe how we should act and treat others (e.g., Miller 2001). Social justice can take many forms (e.g., fair distributions of outcomes, respectful treatment, fair communication of decisions and so forth), but in the past two decades considerable attention has been devoted to the issue of procedural justice. This focus in attention was primarily motivated by Lind and Tyler's (1988: 1) influential book in which they argued that fairness judgments (and related responses) are influenced more strongly by procedures than by outcomes, as such emphasizing the importance of procedures as a core element of social justice. Procedural justice can be defined as the fairness of procedures enacted by an authority when making allocation decisions (i.e. granting voice or not, being accurate and consistent in evaluations and so forth; see Leventhal 1980 for an overview of different procedural rules) and the respectful treatment associated with it (De Cremer et al. 2004).

To date, an impressive amount of literature exists pointing out the importance of procedural justice in promoting a wide variety of psychological outcomes relevant to the functioning of our social lives (see De Cremer and Tyler 2005; Greenberg and Colquitt 2005; Van den Bos and Lind 2002, for overviews).